Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises - Members

Mr. Michael K. Addo

Mr. Michael K. Addo is an academic expert in international human rights law with a particular focus on its implications for international business policy. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter (UK) where he researches and teaches international law, human rights and human rights & business policy at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In this capacity, Mr. Addo has successfully supervised doctoral research in diverse fields of international human rights law including in the field of business and human rights. Mr. Addo has authored and edited several books and scholarly publications including one of the earliest collection of essays on Human Rights Standards and the responsibility of Transnational Corporations (Nijhoff 1998). Mr. Addo is a lawyer by training and an advocate at the Ghana Bar.

Mr. Pavel Sulyandziga

Mr. Pavel Sulyandziga (PhD in Economics) is a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation and advisor to the president of RAIPON (Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East). At the beginning of his career he was a school teacher of mathematics in Primorskiy kray, Russia (1984-1987). In 1991 he was elected as Chairman of the Indigenous Peoples Association of the Primorskiy kray. His international activity included participating in the Eurasian Club (Japan) on assistance to the education and preservation of culture of indigenous peoples (1991-1993); and visiting Indian reservations in the USA (California, Oregon, Washington) to study their experience on education, culture and self-governance (1993). From 1993 to 1994, Mr. Sulyandziga participated in the elaboration of a project on the preservation of biodiversity in the Bikin river valley, where he was responsible for project implementation. In 1994-1995 he participated in the project «Traditional Indigenous Crafts» funded by the Eurasian Club (Japan); he was Indigenous curator of the cooperative project on the preservation of the Ussuri Tiger; and in 1997-2000 he was coordinator of the Danish-Greenlandic Initiative for assistance to indigenous peoples of Russia. In addition, Mr. Sulyandziga was a councilor to the Governor of the Primorskiy kray on indigenous issues (1994-1997). In 1997 he was elected Vice-president and then in 2001 First Vice-president of RAIPON. From 2005 to 2010 he was a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. He has been a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation since 2006.

Mr. Dante Pesce

Mr. Dante Pesce holds a Masters in Political Science from the Catholic University of Chile and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the VINCULAR Center for Social Responsibility and Sustainable Development at the Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile (2001-currently), working in 14 Latin American countries in outreach, capacity building and advisory services related to sustainability and responsible business practices, including business and human rights, sustainability reporting, corporate sustainability strategy. His work involves interactions and projects with public sector organizations, private enterprises and business associations. He has actively collaborated in the development of international standards such as ISO26000, OECD Guidelines for multinational corporations and GRI G3, G3.1 and G4. Mr. Pesce is Special Advisor on Public Policy to the United Nations Global Compact, a Member of the Stakeholder Council to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group within ISO26000. At a national level, he is a member of the Chilean Council on Social Responsibility for Sustainable Development which established Chile’s first National Action Plan 2015-2018. During the late 1980s he was actively engaged in the restoration of democracy in Chile and during the 1990s he was a grassroots NGO leader.

Ms. Anita Ramasastry

Ms. Anita Ramasastry is the Roland L. Hjorth Professor of Law and the Director of the Graduate Program in Sustainable International Development at the University of Washington School Of Law. She researches and teaches in the fields of law and development, anti-corruption, international commercial law and business and human rights. From 2009-2012, Ramasastry served as a senior advisor to the International Trade Administration of the US Department of Commerce. She has authored numerous scholarly articles and reports focused on emerging issues in business and human rights including the influential survey on access to remedy, Commerce, Crime and Conflict (with Mark Taylor and Bob Thompson) and recently has co-chaired an independent commission on Experts with Justice Ian Binnie, focused on commerce, crime and human rights. Ramasastry has advised many intergovernmental and civil society organizations including the World Bank, USAID, the Institute for Human Rights and Business, BSR, Amnesty International and the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable. Ramasastry is a recurring visiting professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights as well as the Central European University in Budapest. She is a founding co editor in chief of the Business and Hunan Rights Journal (Cambridge). Ramasastry is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School and the University of Sydney.

Mr. Surya Deva

Mr. Surya Deva is an Associate Professor at the School of Law of City University of Hong Kong. He holds BA (Hons), LLB and LLM from the University of Delhi and a PhD from Sydney Law School, and has taught previously at the University of Delhi and at the National Law Institute University Bhopal. Mr Deva’s primary research interests lie in Business and Human Rights, Corporate Social Responsibility, India-China Constitutional Law, and Sustainable Development. He has published extensively in these areas, including books Human Rights Obligations of Business: Beyond the Corporate Responsibility to Respect? (co-edited with David Bilchitz) (Cambridge, 2013); and Regulating Corporate Human Rights Violations: Humanizing Business (Routledge, 2012). Mr Deva has also authored commissioned reports for the International Commission of Jurists and the Ethical Trading Initiative. He is a founding Editor-in-Chief of the Business and Human Rights Journal published by Cambridge University Press, and sits on the Editorial/Advisory Board of the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, the Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law, and the International Journal on Human Rights and Business. In 2014, he was elected a Member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law.